Social Media

The final speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is QUT DMRC PhD graduate Dr. Jing Zeng, whose focus is on the automated dissemination of conspiracy theories on Twitter – including suggestions that celebrities like Justin Bieber, industry leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, and royals are actually shape-shifting lizards; that planes spread mind-controlling chemtrails; that the Earth is flat; or that the California wildfires were started by a new energy weapon created by the U.S. government.

Such conspiracy theorists are experts at providing apparently simple explanations for complex phenomena. They also clusters together to support each other’s explanations with self-reinforcing theories that …

The final day at AoIR 2019 begins for me with a panel on social media bots, and the first speakers are Felix Münch and Ben Thies who present a paper that I have also contributed to; the slides are below. Social bots have become quite prominent in media coverage of social media in recent times, with particular focus on platforms like Twitter, but it is difficult to assess just how prevalent they are on such platforms, partly also because it is difficult to get a sense of the make-up of larger social media populations.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is the excellent Nik John, presenting a paper co-authored with Aysha Agbarya. Their focus is on Facebookunfriending practices between Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel during the Israel-Gaza conflict of 2014. From past studies, we already know that it is especially people with strong political views who unfriend, and such unfriending severs weak ties especially frequently; it also results from encountering unwanted group communication styles or online propaganda, and is used to manage one’s own personal public sphere in social networks.

But how do power relationships affect online tie-breaking practices? Are there …

I’ve spent all morning with AoIR business (and moved into my role as Past President), but this afternoon I’m finally attending another AoIR 2019 session, starting with the fabulous Luca Rossi. His focus is on the digital practices of migrants as they navigate the European border regime, especially in the context of the 2015/16 migration crisis.

The project has been using interviews and observations in migrant camps for part of its work, but another component of it has focussed on migrants’ uses of Facebook. t studied some 179 pages, containing 75,000 posts and 2.1 million comments, over a period …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Emma Baulch, who shifts our focus to Indonesian activist uses of WhatsApp. She focusses on ‘buzzers’: content creators who work especially in the context of Indonesian election campaigns and promote specific political candidates across various social media platforms.

Such buzzers produce and promote political memes throughout social media, and in Indonesia also especially on WhatsApp, the top messaging app in the country. This also includes political misinformation, and to address such issues WhatsApp has now placed a limit on users’ ability to share on messages to larger numbers of …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Niki Cheong, who continues our focus on the uses of WhatsApp in Malaysia and Singapore. His project investigates the weaponisation of popular culture for political issues, in particular, and drew on walkthrough and scrollback methods as well as digital ethnography, interviews, and surveys with users.

This began from the observation that the current ‘fake news’ discourse is being weaponised as a tool to suppress dissent, create fear, or scam digitally illiterate citizens, and found that memes, online personalities and influencers, and innovative content formats are being utilised in the process. Indeed …

The next speaker at AoIR 2019 is Amelia Johns, who focusses on private group chats on WhatsApp, especially in the Malaysian context. Malaysia’s political climate has led young adult Malaysian-Chinese political activists to organise through this platform, and WhatsApp is now the second most popular platform in Malaysia (after Facebook). It is also used especially for discussing news and politics, partly due to its use of end-to-end encryption.

Such encryption is especially important because of sedition and media laws in Malaysia, which have created a chilling effect on the public expression of criticism of the monarchy or government …

The next AoIR 2019 session I’m attending is on WhatsApp, and starts with Natalie Pang. She begins by noting the significant popularity of this platform in Asian countries, as well as outlining its particular features of large-scale group broadcasting of messages and end-to-end encryption – which is especially interesting to users discussing sensitive political topics in these countries.

Natalie’s project identified scholarly articles discussing WhatsApp and its uses, and examined 40 such publications that discussed the use of the platform for political or civic engagement; of these, eleven focussed on cases in Europe, ten on Africa, nine on various …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is my colleague Kim Osman, presenting outcomes from our research project in collaboration with The Conversation and the Cooperative Research Centres Association in Australia. We are interested in assessments of the public value and impact of scholarly work, which are also increasingly demanded by the governments that fund scholarly research. Slides here:

Increasingly, platforms like The Conversation as well as social media are also critical to the engagement with and impact of scholarly research, and there has been a rise in the development of scholarly …

It’s Thursday morning, and after the fabulous opening keynote by Bronwyn Carlson last night the AoIR 2019 conference at QUT in Brisbane is now getting started properly. This morning I’m in a panel on metrics in journalism, academia, and music that begins with a paper I’ve been involved in, and which my colleague Aljosha Karim Schapals will present. The slides are here:

Our key question here is whether journalism metrics are trustworthy enough to be used in editorial decision-making. This is part of a larger project on the future of journalism in a post-journalism …